We humans are very good at coming up with nonsense about ourselves, especially when it pertains to envisioning the future. With regard to fashion, crystal-ball gazers have long declared that the new-fangled will one day entirely replace the old-fangled and that there will be an ultra uniformity to how we dress.
The futurists, for example, issued eight manifestos on fashion, like the good Italians they were. They argued for clothes that promoted health and comfort (I agree) and that banished frivolous detail (no thanks). They declared blacks, browns and greys to be retrograde, instead extolling bright colours (I agree) and reflective surfaces (no thanks). Somewhat incongruously, they also went mad for burlap.
Ultimately the futurists believed, with some validity, that clothes would be an important way to eradicate class distinctions. Let them wear burlap, and all that. What they overlooked is that people will always want to dress to manifest some kind of distinction, even if that’s not class.
Rare is the science-fiction setting that doesn’t feature some kind of uniform. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World each caste is distinguished by the colour of its work clothes, with the highest and lowest — the Alphas and the Epsilons — wearing boring old grey and black respectively, while the Betas and the Gammas get to have all the fun, sartorially speaking at least, in mulberry and leaf green.
And yet humans are more manifold, more unpredictable than that. Or rather, they are predictable in their unpredictability. For every move there is a countermove. Which means for all the hi-tech fabrics you can buy these days, for all the future-facing aesthetic options, one of the hottest looks for 2021 is patchwork. Yes, a jacket that appears to have had a previous life as a bedspread — and not just any old bedspread but one that gave service in Little House in the Big Woods — is where it’s at. The swankiest of them — by way of cult American brands such as Bode, Stan, Small Museum and Carleen — sometimes actually did have a previous life as a counterpane.
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Unsurprisingly these one-off creations made out of antiques are not cheap. But this — the slowest of slow fashion — is, for the lucky few who can afford it, the kind of ever-after preciousness that is a matchless riposte to fast fashion. Bode’s website (bodenewyork.com) — which includes new vintage-inspired iterations — is like a history of American patchwork, from the pinwheel and star designs to the so-called crazy quilts that became popular in the middle of the last century. There’s a multi-hue vintage beauty from Carleen available on the British eco fashion website Sust Style that, at £420, is what passes for affordable in the realm of the post-eiderdown jacket (suststyle.com).
Not that such requisitioning is anything new. In 1970 Gloria Vanderbilt wore a striking number by the Cuban-American designer Adolfo that had gone from bedspread to ballgown, its skirts a tessellation of tiny triangles. The now largely forgotten Adolfo — whose clients included CZ Guest, Babe Paley and Nancy Reagan — once said that “one has to dress in bits and pieces, the more the merrier”. In his reappropriation of quilting, those “bits and pieces” were literal.
For a fresh-off-the-peg take on patchwork there’s Anthropologie’s white cotton tie-waist jacket with Liberty-print star patterning and its multi-blue shacket (£130 and £160 respectively, anthropologie.com) or Free People’s pale triangle-patched bomber (£250, harveynichols.com). Polo Ralph Lauren’s bomber is square-patched in a particularly pretty array of florals and checks (£349, ralphlauren.com). To dial up the crazy — in a good way — there’s Sissel Edelbo’s full-spectrum take, conjured out of old saris, which is testament to that famous Diana Vreeland quote about pink being “the navy blue of India” (£300, anthropologie.com).
All of the above would be a suitably summery way to add warmth over the coming months, be it over jeans and a tee or a clash-matched print dress.
The menswear brand Blue Blue Japan channels another patchwork tradition: the Japanese boro jacket (£775, mrporter.com). The name is derived from the word “boroboro”, meaning something tattered or repaired. Boro cloth — made in the indigo-dyed hemp that was prevalent before the introduction of cotton and used for bedding and clothing — would be endlessly patched over generations into a new kind of preciousness. You can download a guide to making a boro-style bag from the V&A website (vam.ac.uk). An original boro is more likely to be hanging on someone’s wall than worn on someone’s back. (The antique dealer Adam Bray has a stunning mounted boro cloth for £3,600, adambray.info.)
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The boro jacket — like the patchwork quilt — was the product of thriftiness, but both became a way not only to make a virtue out of necessity but to turn it into a kind of celebration. Out of supposed leftovers it was possible to create something beautiful and unique, endowed with a personal significance, with stories that only the wearer/sleeper and their loved ones would understand. At a time when many of us feel that we have too much meaningless stuff in our lives and not enough actual meaning, it’s easy to see the appeal of the patchwork.
Fresh as a daisy
No sign of any daisies in my local park yet. I will be wearing this pretty Mango necklace until I can make a proper daisy chain (£17.99, mango.com).
